


⨀

by PastaBucket



Category: J-horror - Fandom, Japanese Mythology
Genre: Curses, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Mystery, Psychological Horror, Yurei, j-horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:48:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27785500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastaBucket/pseuds/PastaBucket
Summary: Heed this warning: This story bears a curse.As a conduit to the world of the dead, I possess the ability to write cursed spirits into my stories.By the time you have finished reading this J-horror story, the curse will have been bestowed upon you, and you may become haunted by what I have contained within.This is my second cursed story. The first story I didn't warn the reader about until the end. For this story, I have decided that I will be more merciful: Read this at your own peril.
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

For as long as I've known her, Kei has always exuded warmth. Happy, friendly, carefree and charming, were just a handful of qualities that made her seem like the bright side of life was always with her.  
That's why it felt so surreal to see her expression pale when I showed her the image. It was as if it had drained all life straight out of her soul.  
"Where did you get this?"  
"I told you: Somebody sent it to me."  
It was just of a silly little girl smiling. I didn't recognize her or the sender, so my best guess was that somebody must have sent it to the wrong address by mistake.  
My friend reluctantly loosened her grip on my phone as I janked it back out of her hand.  
"You should delete it." Her stare was serious as the grave. Even her tone of voice was one that I had never heard before.  
"Why? What's wrong?" I was going to anyway. There was no point in keeping personal photos of strangers on my phone.  
"...and you should block the sender as well. Don't reply." She tried to make it seem like a reasonable thing to do, but it just didn't work.  
"I will if you tell me why.", I baited her.  
"It's a cursed image.", she winced.  
"A cursed image? For real?" Kei was emotional by nature, but I'd never figured her for the superstitious type to believe urban legends.  
"If you keep it, she'll start to haunt you."  
I took another glance at the innocent looking photo. "You're telling me that the girl in the image is dead?"  
"Don't look at it! Delete it now!", she shouted with a disturbing amount of despair.  
"Okay, okay, fine!"  
I hesitated. I didn't believe in ghosts or curses, but I did want to ease the mind of my best friend.  
...so I lied.  
A moment later I showed her the screen of my inbox folder. "See: Gone."  
I watched as the shoulders of my friend relaxed again.  
"I didn't know that urban legends could get you so worked up. They're just stories."  
...but that was the last that Kei had to say about that, and I let her change the subject.

When I got home, I turned my attention back to my phone again. That image had lingered in the back of my mind for the whole afternoon, just as it had lingered in the subfolder I had quickly moved it to. It was just an innocent picture. Why would such a random image end up as a spooky meme on the internet?  
One image search later didn't turn up many hits either. No articles regarding any grisly murders, or any other such incidents. Just the small personal profile of a privated social media account. This image clearly wasn't anything remarkable. Kei must simply have been mistaken, and this was just her misinterpreting a sending mistake as some story she'd heard about recently.  
Searching for the sender's email gave me a name to match the picture: Kanako Yoshida. There were hundreds of girls with that name, so this proved to be another dead end. I sighed in resignation as I lay in my bed: This was a silly mystery that I had conjured up for myself. I should really just go to sleep.

The following afternoon I decided to let the girl know of her mistake: "I'm sorry. You seem to have sent this image to the wrong address. I don't know you. Please check your spelling."  
An hour later I got a reply, of sorts. It was just another image, of two young girls playing together. At first I just wrote the sender off as an idiot. Then a closer look chilled me to my core.  
First I recognized the girl from the previous image. Then I recognized the girl playing with her.

I've been friends with Kei for many years, but we didn't grow up together. She moved to this school from a village just outside of town. It seemed to be a village with just one elementary school. It was a lead - a lead that looked more promising than trying to respond to somebody who was obviously just looking to weird me out. It was awkward to word a letter nicely asking the student records about whether a little girl went to a particular elementary school, so if I'd get no reply, I'd understand, even if it was a long time ago. However, street records immediately listed only the address of a single Kanako Yoshida living in the area. ...and dead people don't live anywhere. It would only take an hour's worth of bus ride to settle the matter. It would be a comforting triumph in being able to show my stalker that I had outstalked her, and ask her what the hell she was doing without any more cryptic images.


	2. Chapter 2

I watched as the landscape outside the bus window passed me by. Occationally the forests gave way to pastures and crop fields, with small, delapidated barns which had probably stood abandoned for decades. The country was a completely unfamiliar world to a city dweller like me. I gathered that this was where all our food came from - well, most of it.

I turned back to my phone. The coverage was missing a bar, but it was still good enough. I saw that I had a new mail notification. It was the school. They apologized for not being able to send information over the phone, and told me that I had to request it in person. I guess a small detour couldn't hurt. It looked like the school was basically on the way to Kanako's address anyway.

The school building looked so small that I hardly believed it could fill any purpose. School hours were over, so there were no signs of the children, but the administration was still in. Opening the wooden double doors and stepping inside its entrance hall, I felt like an intruder. I was neither a small child, nor a teacher. I was just looking to pry into a stranger's personal life, and the life of my best friend. For the first time I doubted what I was doing here. ...but turning back wasn't really an option.

One of the teachers directed me to their lounge, and from there to the principal's office.

"Kanako Yoshida...", the old, bald man repeated my words with afterthought. Then he slowly rose his rotund body from his chair and turned toward a grey old file cabinet in the corner of his cramped, stuffy office. It didn't take long for him to find the folder in question. He knew exactly which drawer to open, which told me that he had been expecting me. Placing the thick paper folder between us, he seated himself without another word. I had expected him to say something more, but instead I just found myself in an awkward silence just staring at the file. I had turned over how to explain things to him in my head, but he hadn't asked me for a story, or even for my relation to the girl. Was it this easy to just ask for student files, or would me opening the file be breaching some sort of confidentiality?

Hesitantly, under the principal's silent observation, I reached out a hand toward the file and opened it. Forms. Personal information. Parent's names. A photograph matching the image I had on my phone. Health conditions. Attention. Assessments. Reports. This was so much more than I had asked for. Even though my curiousity had gotten the better of my shame, reading through all of it would probably take several hours. I didn't know what to look for, or if there was anything to even find. It was clear that a very alive Kanako had attented this school many years ago, and it being the only school in the village, so must Kai have.  
I raised my eyes from the folder to meet the principal's, as he leaned forward in his chair, as much as his belly allowed him to. "Did you find what you were looking for?", he asked with curiosity.  
"Did you know her?", I inquired.  
"Some students stand out more than others." He leaned back again. "The compulsory school system drags out all kind of backgrounds out of the woodwork: Broken homes, neglectful parents, juvenile delinquents, the 'less gifted'... We do what we can for them, but mostly we focus our efforts on keeping them from harming the other children. In extreme cases, such as hers, we have to separate them from the classrooms altogether, to keep them from disrupting the classes.", he monologued in a disinterested tone.  
"She didn't receive an education?" I turned back to the folder. Most of its thickness comprised of various reports.  
"Formally we hire a special tutor, but there's usually nothing they can do but restrain the child and keep an eye on her."  
"Was there any underlying reason for her behavior?"  
"Problems at home, I guess. I think you'll find that social services was contacted at one point, over claims that she wasn't fed properly, but I don't think anything came of it."

Continuing to peruse the reports, my eyes were drawn to a recurring stamp at the bottom of them. Somehow it looked out of place, but at the time I didn't know why.


	3. Chapter 3

"Introduced herself to the class by claiming that she ate cats." "Constant disruptive screaming. Excused from class." "Picks her nose and eats the boogers. Students saw her wiping them off underneath her shirt." "Sucked on the school faucet in front of her classmates." "Can't tell time or tie her shoelaces." "Chases and whips other students with toy belt during breaks." "Doesn't eat school lunches. Refuses to eat even after being locked in a room with food." "Steals food from teacher's lounge." "Claims she's not fed at home." "Rubbed her crotch against corner of a table in front of students." "Sucked on a live microphone while attempting to sing." "Claims she saw Jesus die on the cross on the TV." "Escaped and hid from private teacher. Searched entire school without success." ...and always that stamp: A simple circle with a dot in the middle. I imagined that an official stamp would have at least some word of text.

I had only skimmed through the reports, but I had still spent far too much time at the school, so the sky had begun to blush an evening red as I reached her neighborhood. What a weird child. Maybe that's what Kei had meant. Maybe she was just crazy.

I soon noticed that the house numbers were all wrong. No number was adjacent to the next. I wandered the small, lingering street, trying to make sense of the system, but no matter where I looked, it was as if the numbers avoided even getting close to her address. The internet maps hadn't bothered numbering the houses either.  
"Excuse me. Could you help me? I'm looking for an address." ...but upon hearing the address, the man suddenly just excused himself and left at a faster pace than he had approached me.

My legs had begun to ache, and I was pretty sure that I was completely lost, by the time I stopped to check the buslines. I just had an hour left to catch the last bus out of here. Damn it! This alley was likely the most remote I had managed to find. If this wasn't it, I would have to give up.

I stopped at a small house at the very end of the narrow, desolate street. The fence wasn't even marked with a number. Where they would have been, I just found a couple of empty screwholes. ...but it was so out of the way, swept into the most remote corner of any map, as if it had been rejected by the rest of the houses. Judging by the peeling paint on the gate, and the unkept lawn behind it, and the boarded up windows, it didn't even look lived in anymore. I didn't need any numbers to know that this was it.

As the sun set on me, I did my best to gather my courage. This person clearly wasn't normal. She could even be dangerous. Maybe I should just let her be.  
No, I told myself. I had come this far. I had spent all afternoon trying to track her down. I wasn't a superstitious person.

...but as I tried to pull open the gate, it got caught on something on the ground. I kneeled down to remove the small wooden plank, but quickly pulled my hand back when I recognized what it was. It was an ofuda, impaled into the lawn so that it blocked the gate's path. ...and it wasn't the only one. Evenly spaced out at the feet of the fence, as far as I could see it stretch, more warding seals jutted out of the ground, calling upon various kami for protection. ...and on them I recognized that strange symbol again: A plain circle with a dot in its center.


	4. Chapter 4

I spent the entire ride back focused on combing the web for that symbol. I quickly found out that such a simple symbol had about a dozen different meanings - anything from the old meaning of "sun" and "day", to the highest review grade - but what was lacking was any shinto or buddhist significance. Once again it was so out of place.

Asking Kei about it was just out of the question. She just clearly wasn't comfortable with the entire subject, and I wasn't too comfortable with confessing my deceit to her either. There was this gloom hanging over her now, ever since I had shown her that photo. It was as if all joy had just drained right out of her. We hardly spoke to eachother all day, and when the last class ended she left without so much as saying goodbye. I should have asked her if she was feeling well, but I once again figured that neither of us would be comfortable with discussing the reason.

When I got home I posted my burning question on a buddhist board.  
"I've never seen it before. It's not a kami or a shrine as far as I know. It's likely a local customary thing.", the response read. "Have you tried asking a local shrine?"

There was only one shrine in the village, but I couldn't find any homepage or contact information for it. I actually dreaded the thought of going back. I had left vowing never to return. I couldn't bring myself to believe in curses, but something just wasn't right there, and so I had decided that my solution would be to just avoid the subject altogether, and return to the safe normalcy of civilization. Now it was calling me back there. I felt like my mind wouldn't be able to leave that place until I had found out the meaning of that symbol.

On the bus I sent a message to Kei: "Hey, were you feeling okay today? You looked kind of absent."

The shrine - while pretty far from the center of town - was easier to find than Kanako's home had been. The last time I had visited any shrine, I had been a small child going along with my parents. As I passed through the entrance gate I was once again left with a feeling of intrusion. I wasn't here for worship.

"It's a circle with a dot in the center.", I finally described to the man whom had promised to help me, once we were seated in his room.  
Once again I saw that expression that I had seen take hold in Kei, this time mirrored by the priest. For a moment he just sat there, glaring at me.  
"You are not from around here.", he said in a gravely serious tone that made me shrink in my seat.  
"No.", I whimpered. "I'm sorry."  
"Has she contacted you?"  
I could just nod in response at this point. I had only mentioned seeing the symbol on an ofuda. I had completely omitted where that ofuda had been put up, or any mention of Kanako. ...but still he knew.  
More silence followed. "I see." More silence. "Do you know about the curse?"  
I began nodding again, but changed it to a shake.  
"Most children are born pure", the priest explained. "and as long as they abstain from sinful practices and purify themselves through our shrines, they will remain pure. However, there can be no purity without impurity. Every once in a while, a child with an unclean spirit is born - one who will not be able to tell right from wrong, or purity from sin. For them there is no hope. All that we can do, is shun their wickedness, lest we succumb to it. This is what this mark signifies."  
"She's been sending me pictures."  
"I suggest that you delete them, and block her mail address." That was exactly what Kei had told me. "The unclean lure the innocent to them. Any contact, and any tie to them, will act like a torrent to a whirlpool, drawing you in to consume you. That is why you came here, isn't it?"

That is why I had come here.


	5. Chapter 5

Whatever darkening landscapes of yet again approaching civilization, were passing me by outside the bus window, I wasn't really interested anymore. Upon my request, the priest had provided me with another name through which I could learn more, and I quickly found an address to where in the village she lived. It was to Kanako's only still living relative. Her mother.  
...but I also knew that I should stop this. Digging for occult stuff, and contacting strange old ladies, it just wasn't me. I could still break away from the current. ...couldn't I?

"Kei? Are you there?" I guess if she wasn't answering back, I could see her at school tomorrow.

"Would you just leave me alone?", Kei growled at me with annoyance as she turned to leave the classroom.  
"Kei? Kei!" Before I knew it my hand had grasped a tight hold of her arm.  
"I said leave me alone!", Kei shouted as she struggled to free herself. Finally she managed to bend my digging fingers open, and stepped back and looked back at me clutching her hurting arm. "You went there, didn't you?!", she shouted with a powerful mix of panic, grief and fury in her voice. "I told you to block her and you didn't listen!"  
I just stood there too mortified to speak. She knew. For how long had she known? I must have been spotted by someone she knew. Had she been avoiding me all this time?  
"Just leave me alone!", she growled. "Don't speak to me ever again!"  
Her words just punched the air right out of my stomach. "Kei!", I whimpered. "I... ...need you."  
I didn't have the strength to summon more words to my defense. All I could do is stand there and watch her leave.

That afternoon, as the treelines once again passed by the bus window, I didn't consult my phone this time. I just stared ahead, into the bus seat ahead of me. Despite me hiding it all from Kei, she had felt like my lifeline through all of this. She would have been able to explain - to talk me out of this. Now I was alone. Without her I just didn't have enough strength to fight it anymore. Try as I might, I was now just being swept along with the current, back to yet another strange place, with yet another tie to Kanako. Soon I knew that I would be sinking, and disappear beneath the surface.

Mrs. Yoshida's house wasn't hard to find. It seemed to reside in a much nicer neighborhood than Kanako's, and the house numbers had made sense.  
I still wasn't sure what to say as I rang the doorbell, but some part of me felt like all I needed to do, was show up at her doorstep.  
The woman who opened the door was old and worn, but not too feeble for her age. She only needed to scry the expression in my face, to know why I was standing on her doorstep. "Come in. I'll make you tea."

"I know that a mother should care for her child, but Kanako wasn't an easy child to care for.", she explained to me plainly with a tone of bitter sorrow. "Her father left when she was just five years old. I don't know if it was her or my drinking that drove him away. I tried to maintain contact between him and Kanako, but he refused to have anything to do with any of us after that, and Kanako's attachment to him quickly faded, so I did my best on my own. I gave her the toys I could afford. I drove her to the places she wanted to go. We tried therapy. From a young age she went several times a week, but nothing worked. They couldn't figure out what was wrong with her. First I sent her. Then I sent myself. During the summer breaks, I just sent her away. None of the summer homes wanted her back. Barking like a mad dog, she even bit the ankle of one of them."  
"Why are you telling me this?", I wondered.  
"Oh it's no secret. My child is known throughout the whole village.", she said. "For all my life I felt like Kanako was ultimately my burden to singlehandedly carry to my grave - for what sins I do not know. ...but every once in a while people like you show up, kind enough to share her with me. Just like I once did, some of you think that you'll be able to save her. Others still, have just given up all hope."  
"I'm... ...sorry.", I clumsily comforted her. "Oh!", I then remembered, and reached into my jeans pocket to unfold the simple drawing I had made for her. "I keep coming across this symbol. Could you tell me what it means?"  
She took the note and nodded. "For some reason they call her 'The Chosen One'.", she explained.  
"Who does?"  
"Everyone. They think she's part of some cosmic spiritual balance. They say that she bears a curse - that she's forever unclean." She handed my note back and looked at me. "You should probably ask her about it yourself."  
With a chill running through my body, I realized that I was now nearing the center of the vortex.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning and spoilers:  
> This chapter is basically just one big rape scene. It adds little to the story, so it can be skipped.

After parting with the old lady, I didn't know that I was being followed until the four of them had surrounded me.  
"We want to talk to you. So you know Kanako, eh?" My attempts at leaving was met with a decisive shove. "Don't you know that she's cursed?"  
"I... I don't want to talk to you.", I pleaded.  
"Well, you're going to have to.", the largest of the boys frowned. "You think it's all a game, huh?"  
"Just let me go!"  
...but instead they grabbed onto my arms and dragged me along.  
"Let go of me!" I tried janking free, but it was no use. I felt my hands losing their feelings from the restricted blood supply. Even if I'd refuse to stagger along, they were strong enough to just carry me.

Out of the way of the public street, they pushed me up against a wall. "What sort of a despicable person would willingly associate herself with a Chosen One?", the main bully frowned, before suddenly beginning to squeeze one of my breasts as if he owned it. My arms free, I grabbed hold of his arm to push it off, but when I finally did his other hand was massaging my outer thigh and squeezing my buttcheek. With my last reserves of panic I shrieked and began struggling to get free, but it was easy for the two other boys to pin my arms back against the coarse wood behind me. I let out a disgusted yelp as I felt his hand firmly grab onto my happy place. "You have some sort of perverse desire for the unclean, huh. So eager to give up your innocence. We'll help you with that."  
Flustered I struggled against their grips, while I felt my crotch began to bloom in betrayal. He opened the fly to my pants and pulled them down along with my underwear and I understood that he was actually going to enter me. I squirmed in vain as he lifted my hip up in the air, but as he finally shot up into me, it was all over. For every breath I took after that, he just forced another groan out of me as his cock hit my deepest parts. I was having sex, my very will floating away on primal carnal urges that I had never felt before as he mercilessly forced me to want him. With a shuddering cry, I clenched onto his shoulders and as he finally began throbbing inside of me. He was shooting his seed into my very womb, and at that moment it was all that I longed for.  
When he finally let me go, I just fell to the ground, powerless to stand, his semen leaking out of my hole. I heard the sound of more pants being undone, and I realized that it was far from over.  
The next boy soon positioned himself on top of me, even stranger than the first one, and once again lovely cock slid into me, smearing my walls with the semen from the first. I didn't know what I was doing. I just held onto him as he began pounding me with renewed sexual urges, swept away deeper and deeper into madness. As he shoot a new load inside me, the world just began spinning in my head. I felt my back arch and my very first penetrated orgasm rock my body in response. Something stronger had taken hold of it, and I was just along for the ride now.

I gasped for air as the third boy entered me, and after that the dizziness just gave way to oblivion. I remembered them leaving long before the world stopped spinning, and I just found myself lying halfnaked in the grass, utterly sore, numb, cold and shivering. For a long while I saw no point in moving anymore. I felt that this would be the spot where they would find my dead body - that they had killed me. It was so surreal and unfathomable. Out of nowhere they had just violated every part of me except, thankfully, my asshole. Why? Nothing made sense anymore.

My head began spinning again as I rose myself and began pulling up my pants again, only to find long strands of wet semen dribble down into them. Wincing, I tried to scoop out as much as I could with cold, trembling fingers. I had done nothing to these guys, and now I was just full of their seed. I could get pregnant. "Shit!"  
Finally surrendering to soaking my crotch with my own underwear, I slowly began stagger back into the street again. Continuing living meant getting home, which meant getting the body I had been so graciously handed back to me, onto the next bus.


	7. Chapter 7

I called up my school and told them that I was too sick to attend, which in a way was true. I could hardly sleep, and I had woken up screaming and fighting from sheer anxiety. My hands trembling, I floated in and out of consciousness, making it impossible to focus on the simple routine of eating breakfast.  
The idea to go out in the world and buy a package of morning-after pills occured to me as something that I could do, if I was sensible enough. ...but I wasn't anymore. That part of me was just gone, as if they had ripped it straight out of my skull and left a gaping crater. I could always get an abortion, I figured. ...if it ever became an issue. If I lived long enough.  
It was as if the entire world had crumbled into ruins around me, like unglued matchstick houses, and that all that was left was the one thing that I felt capable of facing: Kanako. I felt ready now. I had nothing left to lose.

When I came to again, emerging from the semi-unconscious haze of the matchstick world, with its little matchstick village, I had arrived. The gate path was still barred by the ofuda, and beyond it the house stood as undisturbed as ever. I kneeled in front of it, and began wiggling it from side to side, out of the earth, before finally to tossing it aside. It didn't scare me anymore.  
As I looked around me, I caught the neighbors peering at me from their windows, probably just as they had peered during my first visit. As I stared back they backed away.  
I opened the little fence door and began walking up the small path bordered by the wildgrown lawn vegetation. Shide paper covered the floorboards of the front porch. I didn't bother knocking. The door was slightly ajar.

Carefully I opened the door and crossed the treshold into Kanako's home. Dust motes played in the light falling in through the cracks of the borded up windows. The sparse lights fell on an untidy landscape of furniture, containers, items and papers.  
I should have called out, to let anyone know that I was intruding on her home, but at this point I had the strange feeling of already having been invited. Like everyone else that I had visited, she too had been expecting me. Slowly I made my way across the entrance area.  
I had gotten about halfway, then the silhouette of a figure staggered into the doorway ahead of me. Her gown - once a solemn white - had been worn to tatters, matching her disheveled long hair. None of us spoke a word. We didn't have to. She was completely unrecognizable from the photos she had sent me, and I knew now that those were one of the few memories of when she had ever felt happy.

As we closed our distance, I felt as if my feet were merely struggling to keep up, as if I was falling toward a black hole. Without any sense of fear, I looked straight into the hair covering her face, and as I felt her cold, bony fingers clutch my shoulders, I had already stopped caring what would happen to me. She could have me. She could have whatever she wanted. I wrapped my arms around her dirty dress and pulled her in closer, pressing my still sore body against her cold frame. Soon I felt her arms wrap across my shoulders, and beyond the physical limits of our bodies, I felt my very soul continue to fall into her. I felt the presence of a hunger like I've ever felt before - a desperate hunger for warmth, and for life itself. I didn't care if this black void had a bottom. She needed every last bit of me.

Then there was a sudden shriek, and I felt her stiffen. Something was wrong. I backed off in time for her to jerk forward yet again. Then she toppled to the floor, revealing another figure crawling on top of her. Frozen in shock I just stood there and watched the second figure continue to strike the blade into Kanako's back over and over again in a mindless frenzy that didn't end until long after Kanako was still.

As I stood there just gawking, Kei's accusing eyes met mine. They contained an icy determination that was as alien to me as her dread and gloom had been just a few days ago. "I told you to stay away.", she said in a trembling voice as she struggled to catch her breath from the ordeal, before pulling the embedded knife out of Kanako's back one final time. "...but you just wouldn't listen." She wiped the bloodsoaked blade off in Kanako's dress and turned to speak to her lifeless head. "That's right, you little pissant: I was in on it all! We were all in on it! Everybody was in on it, you dumbass! You were the Chosen One! Without you there would be no us! Without the outsider there can be no community! ...and so I took what I could from you, and then I went out into the world and made something of myself, and I left you to rot!"

"Kei... She's dead.", I finally exhaled.


	8. Epilogue

We left Kanako's house together after that, but we didn't speak a word on the bus home. The Kei I knew - or thought I had known - was gone. All that warmth that I had enjoyed being in the presence of so much, she had somehow stolen from Kanako.

It wasn't long before Kei started hanging out with other classmates. Sometimes I caught them sneering at me, and so I knew that she was spreading rumors about me. As far as they were concerned, I was their outsider now.

As for Kanako's murder, nothing came of it. None of us spoke a word of it. People had seen me at the scene, so I was sure that I would get prison for at least accessory to her murder if I said anything. I doubted anyone in that village would corroborate my bizarre story.

...but I had expected her body to at least get found by someone. ...but it wasn't. Even when they tore down that old house decades later, no article mentioned anything about finding a body.

⨀

**Author's Note:**

> Kanako. The living dead girl. Just like me, a conduit between the living and the dead. Was she alive or dead to you? Ask if a fellow reader agrees with you. You'd be surprised.
> 
> This story is actually a more mature take on Yuyuko's backstory from Yuyuko's Everyday Life, with a village choosing a subject to be ritualistically cannibalized via calculated, conspiratorial bullying, in order to sustain its dignity and karma through backbiting, condemnation and not seldom outright lies. You could go as far as to say that Kanako's mother chose her even before she was born, whether she was fully aware of it or not. Her classmates picked up on it, and then the teachers, and so on. This very much happens in real life too, only in a less formal manner. Without any support, Kanako was powerless to stop it.


End file.
